HS2 should stop at more stations in the Chilterns

[MatthewHutton]

With your proposal now featuring multiple intermediate stations and alternate stopping patterns south of Birmingham, it’s no longer HS2. Instead, it’s a second Chiltern Main Line.

You know the worlds first high speed line has an intermediate stop every 30km on average and multiple stopping patterns so most of those stops get an express service every 2 hours or more?

 

[Farigiraf]

You know the worlds first high speed line has an intermediate stop every 30km on average and multiple stopping patterns so most of those stops get an express service every 2 hours or more?

The populations are a bit higher round there. There's also transfer options to local rail at most of them. With that in mind, every 2 hours is a bit rubbish.
An Aylesbury Parkway with no other connections with 1 train every hour or two would never hit 1m users.

it’s no longer HS2

Wouldn't be High Capacity 2 either. Just a gold-plated commuter line.

 

[MatthewHutton]

They're not even preemptively building EWR stations, they're closing some. That's my guide as to what development is going to happen

That’s because those stations get like 50k passengers a year or less.

Emphasis added. The airport has 61m users and is five miles from the city centre. The station has long (the largest airport station in the country) and short distance rail services (which continue on to city suburbs/dormitory towns), more like Charles De Gaulle. I don't see how it's comparable to an M25 station, it's worth focusing on a valid comparison rather than a wildly hopeful one. The car park next to the station has 3000 spaces (more than Birmingham Interchange was once due to have) and seems to bill itself as a destination, as they spent a billion euros on it. https://www.thesquaire.com/#parking

Then I guess we have to agree to disagree as there aren’t typically stations close to a mega city with clear passenger numbers that aren’t also at an airport or major attraction.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 28 May 2026 ==

The populations are a bit higher round there

Not much. The mountains and the sea constrain things.

An Aylesbury Parkway with no other connections with 1 train every hour or two would never hit 1m users

Even though French stations with much lower population density and the same service level get more than half a million?

And the sky really wouldn’t fall on HS2 if the service was hourly which is effectively what e.g Haddenham and Thame Parkway gets off peak with 900k passengers a year.

 

[Farigiraf]

Even though French stations with much lower population density and the same service level get more than half a million?

Half a million is only half of a million. Even with 3 or 4 stops between London and Birmingham, that's still far from:

many millions of passengers

And it's not accurate to be comparing any of these intermediate stops with the likes of Valence TGV or Avignon TGV, which have onward connectivity and provide the main long-distance service to these sizeable towns. Aylesbury has Chiltern trains to London which aren't much slower door-to-door than using a HS2 parkway, so usage would mostly be from people travelling north, which people in rural Buckinghamshire don't do often. It's better to compare with say Meuse TGV, Vendôme–Villiers-sur-Loir TGV or Haute-Picardie TGV, where usage is in the 300-400k range.

Not much. The mountains and the sea constrain things.

The only station on the line that doesn't either serve a city that'd be large by UK standards, or has good transfer options to local rail, is Shin-Fuji.
And unless the topography of rural Buckinghamshire rapidly shifts, any intermediate HS2 station wouldn't even get near Shin-Fuji's usage.

 

[Farnborough]

There are a lot of HS2 services. Plenty to spread around with different stopping patterns.

And there are already plenty of Chiltern and WCML services. Hopefully more once HS2 is available.

HS2 is not the only railway in the equation

 

[Peter Sarf]

Do they heck.

But if the benefits are so brilliant then the politicians won’t mind experiencing the same things that people living next to a construction site have to experience. It’s only fair. They insist it is necessary to do the construction, so they can share the joy. It’s only a bit of noise and dust, surely they’d not object? It’s for the greater good and all that. What do you mean they don’t want a pneumatic drill in *their* back yard?

Will building a station there make it OK with the locals ?.

What you are proposing is that if a few have to suffer then we should all suffer - needlessly.
I won't pretend that there is no gain without pain.

I wonder what the people of Manchester make of all this. SE England trying to block improvements for the UK.

The real gain is for the economy. We are trying to bring larger UK cities closer together so as to make the South East less of an economic bubble. Pandering to those who object in the South East or Home Counties is not helping the likes of Manchester or Birmingham (let alone beyond). Building HS2 will also benefit the less rich that live along the West Coast Main Line. We cannot please everyone, if we try to then NOTHING will get done and really in the UK we get so little done.

I was travelling on High Speed rail in France in 1986 - Forty years later we in the UK are struggling to get our second new line even half done.

Electrification - most of our neighbours have little left to do whereas we are struggling to get on with the Midland Mainline. We have not completed the Great Western Mainline.

The UK has corruption and lots of it. Particularly in local government but also in national government too. As Robert Jenrick proved.

There is a reason why the UK’s Transparency International index score has been steadily decreasing for years (where low means bad and high means good) and now the UK’s score actually isn’t very much higher than Qatar’s score.

Democratically elected officials making democratic decisions. The horror!


Chesham and Aylesbury are surprisingly deprived towns, certainly in parts. Amersham and the Chalfonts are the opposite.

Must be a pure coincidence that the line goes into a tunnel to the east of the Chalfonts, running underneath the Chalfonts and Amersham. Also a coincidence that the line comes back above ground just to the west of Chesham before running through the southern edge of Aylesbury.

Probably because the well off live where they want to so out of the valley high up on a hill with a nice view - they can afford to. And they can afford to drive unlike the poorer so the distance is no problem. The railway does not want to climb up and over the hill so has to go in a tunnel.

For places like Birmingham (cities) the poor live near transport routes because they needed to. Developments grew up around the transport route not the other way round. The rich move away. So putting HS2 along an existing transport corridor does not mean the poor are being cheated. It means HS2 trying to choose an inner city route that is already blighted.

Personally I wanted HS2 to follow the GW route straight through Birmingham so Birmingham was on the way to Manchester but that would have impacted even more inner city less rich dwellers.

...............................

Given you can only get to two places seriously from e.g Le Cresout TGV it compares pretty favourably with e.g Nuneaton which has 400k passengers to London.

But how far apart are the stations of substance (in/near cities) ?.

It has also occurred to me. Ashford international on the UKs one and only high speed line - No Eurostar services actually stop there ?.

.............................

Do not forget that SNCF are hyper conservative about scheduling. There’s a small 1km section of single track after a grade separated junction off the Bordeaux line to the bypass. SNCF claim it limits capacity to 1 train per hour per direction. Us and the Swiss would run 6 per direction very comfortably.

Whereas in the UK we shoe horn as much in as we can onto lines and it all falls apart so often. A nice simple line with all the trains doing the same thing (none of then stopping halfway) is the goal.

I'd love to believe the UK could adopt Japanese culture in this respect. But people won't even move aside to let passengers off the train first so I won't hold my breath.

Every day I encounter that in the UK (someone in the way of the exit). We have quite a lot of rules and conventions and a lot of people do not follow them.

A decision being democratic does not make the grounds not spurious. It means the decision reflects the will of the electorate which in this case is nimbyism.

The extent to which we make planning decisions based on evaluating the benefits to society as a whole rather than the preferences of the people who happen to be living nearby to the area (ignoring the people who might live nearby in the future or use the infrastructure that's built there) is an interesting question. I think in this country we have avoided

+

really answering the question by pretending there are solutions that please everyone.

+

Why didn't we know we were incapable of building it to cost. That's the actual question!!

IMHO - (a) almost everyone likes a new railway, (b) everyone wants to draw their own railway (crayon), (c) someone has to procrastinate and decide which scribble of crayons to build, (d) the government contracts out the work, badly, (e) those whose scribble was rejected insist their scribble was better and introduce more years of delay and procrastination, variation orders, legal challenges etc.

If we'd known then what we know now .. then we should've all packed up and gone home, but they spent the money on a fast line that isn't going to be ready for a decade instead of the local line, so I'm afraid we'll have to pack up, and walk or catch the bus home instead..

This is the reality, we in the UK are tied up in knots. It is not a place to get anything done easily and there is a price for that - decline.

 

[MatthewHutton]

It has also occurred to me. Ashford international on the UKs one and only high speed line - No Eurostar services actually stop there ?.

Ashford is effectively on an island - and also to be fair you can get to St Pancras International in half an hour every half an hour. And that was possible on day one - not if they find the extra money to add a separate link from Aylesbury to Old Oak Common.

The real gain is for the economy. We are trying to bring larger UK cities closer together so as to make the South East less of an economic bubble. Pandering to those who object in the South East or Home Counties is not helping the likes of Manchester or Birmingham (let alone beyond). Building HS2 will also benefit the less rich that live along the West Coast Main Line. We cannot please everyone, if we try to then NOTHING will get done and really in the UK we get so little done.

There would be a bigger win for journey times than the time cost of an extra station on HS2 if the tram went in a tunnel from Deansgate to Manchester Piccadilly.

And quite frankly doing London-Manchester in 1h15 or 1h45 isn’t enormously different anyway. It’s all much faster than driving or taking a plane.

EDIT: If HS2 had come in at a quarter of its current cost then Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield could all have had metro systems like their continental peers. That would do a lot more for growth than HS2 being 10 minutes slower because you had more stops.

 

[D365]

And there are already plenty of Chiltern and WCML services. Hopefully more once HS2 is available.

HS2 is not the only railway in the equation

Bingo.

Now if the OP had made it clear from the start that they are proposing to abandon HS2 in its (eventual) real world guise and convert it into a Chiltern Main Line Mk2 instead, that would have been a very interesting speculative discussion.

 

[MatthewHutton]

Hopefully more once HS2 is available.

How will there be more Chiltern services after HS2 is available and how will that help people along the route north of Amersham?

 

[Peter Sarf]

There are a lot of HS2 services. Plenty to spread around with different stopping patterns.

I suggested at the start that assuming 15tph overall you could do 3 stops with 3tph and 2tph in between that run non stop but with pathing allowance. And yes that means slowing all of your services down by 5/6 minutes or whatever, but you’d be gaining many millions of passengers. The nearby population density for Avignon, Aix and Valence TGV is somewhat higher than along HS2 perhaps, but they get 3-4 million passengers each which is very respectable.

Avignon, and Valence are a very long way from Paris. A lot further than even London to Manchester so there are different benefits for them that do not interfere with Paris to Lyon (a lot further from Paris than London-Manchester). They are like stops on HS2 would be beyond Manchester - arguably Scotland.

Aix is quite a long way from Paris. About 250 miles so comparable to Manchester. You do realise in comparison Birmingham is already an intermediate stop on a high speed line ?.

You are trying to turn a long distance high speed line into a metro service.

If you got say 2 million a stop, that’d be 10-15% more total passengers in exchange for a 5-6 minute delay. And M25, Kenilworth and Stone, Staffordshire would likely do significantly better than that.

I am not sure the numbers would be that high. But is it worth the cost of downgrading the main purpose of the route ?.

That’s because those stations get like 50k passengers a year or less.

Then I guess we have to agree to disagree as there aren’t typically stations close to a mega city with clear passenger numbers that aren’t also at an airport or major attraction.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 28 May 2026 ==


Not much. The mountains and the sea constrain things.

Most of Japans population is around the coast. So lines can pick up significant population centres along most parts of the coast. The Chilterns / Buckinghamshire have lower population densities relative to London, Birmingham and Manchester.

Ashford is effectively on an island - and also to be fair you can get to St Pancras International in half an hour every half an hour. And that was possible on day one - not if they find the extra money to add a separate link from Aylesbury to Old Oak Common.

There would be a bigger win for journey times than the time cost of an extra station on HS2 if the tram went in a tunnel from Deansgate to Manchester Piccadilly.

And quite frankly doing London-Manchester in 1h15 or 1h45 isn’t enormously different anyway. It’s all much faster than driving or taking a plane.

Saving almost 30% of a journey time is sacrosanct. It will make Manchester and London easier to travel between. We surely do not want to interfere with that.

EDIT: If HS2 had come in at a quarter of its current cost then Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield could all have had metro systems like their continental peers. That would do a lot more for growth than HS2 being 10 minutes slower because you had more stops.

Well that is a problem with construction costs in the UK. Not specific to railways or even transport.

 

[35B]

Ashford is effectively on an island - and also to be fair you can get to St Pancras International in half an hour every half an hour. And that was possible on day one - not if they find the extra money to add a separate link from Aylesbury to Old Oak Common.

There would be a bigger win for journey times than the time cost of an extra station on HS2 if the tram went in a tunnel from Deansgate to Manchester Piccadilly.

And quite frankly doing London-Manchester in 1h15 or 1h45 isn’t enormously different anyway. It’s all much faster than driving or taking a plane.

EDIT: If HS2 had come in at a quarter of its current cost then Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield could all have had metro systems like their continental peers. That would do a lot more for growth than HS2 being 10 minutes slower because you had more stops.

Ashford (and Ebbsfleet) were built because the Eurostar traffic that was the basis for HS1 wouldn't use the capacity, and therefore a plan was hatched to use HS1 to accelerate some commuter services out of London before stopping in Kent, with the "internal" services coming off the HS before then continuing on existing tracks.

That is not a comparable situation to HS2, where the traffic (and capacity gain) is long distance and therefore intermediate stops erode benefits, by reducing capacity and/or adding cost. If an Aylesbury Parkway is built (for the sake of argument, lets say where HS2 and the Aylesbury - Princes Risborough line cross), the benefits for HS2 need to be compared with the traffic that will be lost to Chiltern, and the impact that will have on the sustainability of those services.

Build it further north (say near Brackley), then you recreate the problem of the GCR London Extension, by providing capacity in a lightly populated area with decent alternatives - decent alternatives whose scope for improvement may itself be compromised by introduction of an alternative that will draw park & ride traffic.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 28 May 2026 ==

How will there be more Chiltern services after HS2 is available and how will that help people along the route north of Amersham?

Why is that 20 mile stretch of low population so worthy of HS2 style improvement? Or is this really an "Aylesbury trains are too slow" viewpoint?

 

[Tetchytyke]

If this country could actually build things efficiently we wouldn't be dealing with such a fiasco and could've been operating Phase 1 this year.

The efficient way of dealing with local opposition to schemes is to get the chequebook out. It’s what the French did- and still do. The farmers’ objections all faded away when the cheque was big enough. That’s not to say that local objections are unreasonable but more a pragmatic realisation that everyone eventually has a price at which they’ll tolerate things.

Instead HS2 have chosen to try and nickel-and-dime everyone and they’re shocked- SHOCKED- that they have little or no goodwill with local people left.

The local projects they have done have all involved building things for local people- and some of those village halls have been grossly over-engineered- which no doubt helps the profit margin of the constructors. But they’d have just been much better off in simply paying people a fair price for their homes and businesses first time, rather than trying to stiff people line-by-line.

 

[MatthewHutton]

The only station on the line that doesn't either serve a city that'd be large by UK standards, or has good transfer options to local rail, is Shin-Fuji.

There’s a fair few stations on the Tokaido Shinkansen with 250-300k people within 15km of the station. Stone, Staffordshire would have 361k plus good rail connections and the M6. Lichfield has 450k within that distance and the A38. Kenilworth has 637k within that distance and the A46.

South of Leamington is weaker at maybe 100k or a little more close to possible stop locations - but also with stronger rail connections than some of the French stops.

And it's not accurate to be comparing any of these intermediate stops with the likes of Valence TGV or Avignon TGV, which have onward connectivity and provide the main long-distance service to these sizeable towns.

Most people drive to those places. And there’s only 241k people within 15km of Valence TGV and 271k within 15km of Avignon TGV. Aix is bigger with 498k.

All as per the population circle mapper - https://www.tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulations/?lat=35.31201&long=136.29072&distance_km=15

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 28 May 2026 ==

Why is that 20 mile stretch of low population so worthy of HS2 style improvement? Or is this really an "Aylesbury trains are too slow" viewpoint?

Wendover for example has 300k people within 15km. That’s not low density.

 

[Tetchytyke]

I was travelling on High Speed rail in France in 1986 - Forty years later we in the UK are struggling to get our second new line even half done.

The French built their first railways through rural areas and they left the tricky bits from the edge of the cities until much later.

And- here’s the thing- they compensated land owners fairly rather than trying to stiff people. It took HS2 seven years- seven!- to pay the former landlord of the Bree Louise a fair price for his pub. Imagine if they’d just written the cheque rather than wasting all those man-hours on fighting him.

Maybe then the HS2 lawyers would have noticed all those fraudulent sub-contractors who were employing staff who didn’t actually exist…

 

[MatthewHutton]

hat is not a comparable situation to HS2, where the traffic (and capacity gain) is long distance and therefore intermediate stops erode benefits

Are you really arguing that if you built Calvert, Kenilworth, Lichfield and Stone and got say 1.5m, 4m, 4m and 3m passengers a year that you’d lose more than that by trip times increasing by 10 minutes?

 

[Farigiraf]

Stone, Staffordshire would have 361k plus good rail connections and the M6. Lichfield has 450k within that distance and the A38. Kenilworth has 637k within that distance and the A46.

Stoke, Lichfield, Leamington and Coventry will all have fast rail services to London on the existing lines post-HS2. It's not comparable to Japan where the classic services are 3-4 times slower than the HSR.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 28 May 2026 ==

The French built their first railways through rural areas and they left the tricky bits from the edge of the cities until much later.

Going in circles now. As stated upthread, London terminals are significantly more squeezed for capacity than any Paris counterparts. There would be zero capacity gains from HS2 if you only built the line as far as Watford or Wembley. Journey times on French LGV are more important, while HS2 in the UK is primarily about making space on the WCML for more locals and freight. Manchester-London is already only 2 hours, whereas Paris-Bordeaux on the classic lines was around 4 hours.

 

[nw1]

Aix is quite a long way from Paris. About 250 miles so comparable to Manchester.

I realise this is a minor point but I'd guess what is meant is Aix-en-Provence, which is a lot further than 250 miles. Presumably there's some other Aix somewhere.

 

[MatthewHutton]

Stoke, Lichfield, Leamington and Coventry will all have fast rail services to London on the existing lines post-HS2. It's not comparable to Japan where the classic services are 3-4 times slower than the HSR.

Leamington won’t and Stoke is barely going to see any trip time improvements as the HS2 service goes via Stafford and will be down to 1tph. Lichfield and Coventry will get more reliable service but they will be slower than today and in the case of Coventry less frequent.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 28 May 2026 ==

I realise this is a minor point but I'd guess what is meant is Aix-en-Provence, which is a lot further than 250 miles. Presumably there's some other Aix somewhere.

Aix TGV is Aix-en-Provence.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 28 May 2026 ==

Going in circles now. As stated upthread, London terminals are significantly more squeezed for capacity than any Paris counterparts. There would be zero capacity gains from HS2 if you only built the line as far as Watford or Wembley.

HS1 also had those issues without costs getting silly.

 

[nw1]

Leamington won’t and Stoke is barely going to see any trip time improvements as the HS2 service goes via Stafford and will be down to 1tph. Lichfield and Coventry will get more reliable service but they will be slower than today and in the case of Coventry less frequent.

Presumably with a quieter WCML, they could easily run two fast services from Coventry to London per hour (though I was surprised Coventry wasn't to be served by a spur off HS2).

 

[MatthewHutton]

Presumably with a quieter WCML, they could easily run two fast services from Coventry to London per hour (though I was surprised Coventry wasn't to be served by a spur off HS2).

They could theoretically but it’s never been proposed. What is proposed is 2 semi fast to Birmingham, 1 semi fast to Manchester and I believe 1 semi fast to Glasgow. Probably also 1 fast to Chester.

 

[Farigiraf]

Leamington won’t and Stoke is barely going to see any trip time improvements as the HS2 service goes via Stafford and will be down to 1tph. Lichfield and Coventry will get more reliable service but they will be slower than today and in the case of Coventry less frequent.

They don't need trip time improvements. People in Leamington or Cov will take a 1h 15 train service that goes directly to London over an edge of town parkway that's a bit faster but more expensive and less convenient any day of the week. In comparison, Macon or Vendôme to Paris takes multiple hours on the classic lines and runs infrequently.

 

[MatthewHutton]

They don't need trip time improvements. People in Leamington or Cov will take a 1h 15 train service that goes directly to London over an edge of town parkway that's a bit faster but more expensive and less convenient any day of the week. In comparison, Macon or Vendôme to Paris takes multiple hours on the classic lines and runs infrequently.

Given most people don’t live in town centres I don’t think that’s true actually - and the service level away from London would be much more improved than that.

EDIT: Bristol parkway does pretty well.

 

[stevieinselby]

And quite frankly doing London-Manchester in 1h15 or 1h45 isn’t enormously different anyway. It’s all much faster than driving or taking a plane.

For a city centre to city centre journey, the train already wins hands-down.
But if you're making a journey from, say, Bolton to Stratford, then by the time you've added on the connections at each end then the train might not be fast enough to attract people out of their cars – and most people who are driving are going from suburb to suburb. Cutting half an hour off the train time will be enough to tip a significant number of actual journeys into "better by train" even after factoring in local connections at one or both ends.

 

[MatthewHutton]

For a city centre to city centre journey, the train already wins hands-down.
But if you're making a journey from, say, Bolton to Stratford, then by the time you've added on the connections at each end then the train might not be fast enough to attract people out of their cars – and most people who are driving are going from suburb to suburb. Cutting half an hour off the train time will be enough to tip a significant number of actual journeys into "better by train" even after factoring in local connections at one or both ends.

The driving time from London to Manchester is 4 hours on a good day. 1h45 even and certainly 1h30 city centre to city centre is always going to be faster even for suburb to suburb trips. And if it isn’t there’s a much stronger case to improve the suburb-city centre trips within Manchester - which has a much larger general benefit.

And yes from west of London it’s not as far to Manchester. But more stops would help there.

 

[Tetchytyke]

As stated upthread, London terminals are significantly more squeezed for capacity than any Paris counterparts.

Indeed. But that’s the answer as to why other countries have built their lines more quickly.

while HS2 in the UK is primarily about making space on the WCML for more locals and freight

That’s merely the latest retrofitted excuse for what is, and always will be, a giant white elephant. If it were genuinely true then HS2 wouldn’t have been so ludicrously over-engineered.

And if capacity on the WCML were genuinely an issue then the ORR wouldn’t have just given consent for an open access operator to clog up the fast lines with tiny little trains.

 

[quantinghome]

You know the worlds first high speed line has an intermediate stop every 30km on average and multiple stopping patterns so most of those stops get an express service every 2 hours or more?

Not a sensible comparison. The equivalent hypothetical in the UK to Japan's pre-Shinkansen railways would be if Greater London extended all the way out to Aylesbury but Aylesbury was only connected to central London by a slow, circuitous, metre-gauge line. If that was the case then of course there would be a much stronger case for having multiple stopping patterns.

 

[MatthewHutton]

Not a sensible comparison. The equivalent hypothetical in the UK to Japan's pre-Shinkansen railways would be if Greater London extended all the way out to Aylesbury but Aylesbury was only connected to central London by a slow, circuitous, metre-gauge line. If that was the case then of course there would be a much stronger case for having multiple stopping patterns.

Aylesbury to London is a pretty slow trip

 

[Bletchleyite]

Not a sensible comparison. The equivalent hypothetical in the UK to Japan's pre-Shinkansen railways would be if Greater London extended all the way out to Aylesbury but Aylesbury was only connected to central London by a slow, circuitous, metre-gauge line. If that was the case then of course there would be a much stronger case for having multiple stopping patterns.

It's not far off true. Not metre gauge, but the journey time is around an hour for a journey about the same as from Tring to Euston (37 minutes on the half hourly semi fast), as a result of which a lot of Aylesburyites (!) drive there instead.

I like its quirky civility, but overall it's not a great service.

 

[Tetchytyke]

The equivalent hypothetical in the UK to Japan's pre-Shinkansen railways would be if Greater London extended all the way out to Aylesbury but Aylesbury was only connected to central London by a slow, circuitous, metre-gauge line.

It is extremely slow. 62 minutes to go 45 miles.

From Tring, a similar distance out, it is 37 minutes.

 

[Krokodil]

but they spent the money on a fast line that isn't going to be ready for a decade instead of the local line

The local line wouldn't have been in service much quicker. Portishead reopening has been in the wings for decades and it's only three miles long.

That’s merely the latest retrofitted excuse for what is, and always will be, a giant white elephant.

It's not "retrofitted" at all. HS2 was conceived from the very beginning as a WCML relief line.